I was a Fortune 500 HR SVP for ten million years, but I was an opera singer before I ever heard the term HR. The higher I got in the corporate world, the more operatic the action became. I started writing about the workplace for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, but it took me ages to find my own voice. Now I write for the Huffington Post, Business Week, LinkedIn, the Harvard Business Review, the Denver Post and Forbes.com and lead the worldwide Human Workplace movement to reinvent work for people. Stop by and join us: http://www.humanworkplace.com

'If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It': Not True

Fifteen years later I still find it weird that I sucked down so much nonsense working in the corporate world, lots of it without even noticing. I sat in workshops and seminars and heard the most patently ridiculous garbage shoveled at me and the other participants, year after year for decades.

Why didn’t I question the standard business dogma, what we at Human Workplace call the Godzilla frame, at the time? I was distracted, with an endless To Do list always playing in my head. I’d hear some idiotic nostrum repeated for the millionth time and sigh, but sighing was as far as it went. Now I’m not complacent about the dangerous, anti-human and soul-crushing lens we apply to the business world. I’m militant about it, these days.

Who ripped business, a human activity as creative and inspiring as producing a Broadway show (which, of course, is business) or planting a garden or having a baby, and shoved it into a grey metal box labelled Formal, Stiff, Slow, Rulebound and Boring? Business doesn’t have to be any of those things. It ticks me off when people behave as though it does.

I come from Fortune 500 America, from the top floor where the conference tables are enormous and covered in dark wood with a leather inlay, and the CEO’s private plane is nearby and decisions of huge import are made by the minute, the hour, the day. The stakes are high. It’s fun to be on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Who would ever imagine it differently?

So why then, two floors below in the engine room, is the energy so much less free, organic and fun? Why is the system completely different down there, every step prescribed and every keystroke counted and sorted and judged? That doesn’t seem fair, does it? It isn’t fair and it isn’t smart. To hire talented people and hobble them with bureaucracy is the height of stupidity and poor management to boot.

The problem with Godzilla is that people don’t see him. He’s been there forever, churning out policies and guidelines and rules, and for the most part we shrug our shoulders and say “Well, that’s how it is in big companies. That’s how it is in government.” Why, though? Why do we accept the sludge in the system? We wouldn’t accept sludge that came from other sources — from our employees’ languor or our customers’ failing to pay us, for instance. But we accept the Godzilla sludge, a brake on everything from collaboration to cash flow, because we don’t think there is anything to question, much less to change.

Listen to Godzilla’s language, and you’ll see how indoctrinated we’ve become. A typical ridiculous, unquestioned business adage is “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” That’s BS on the face of it, because the vast majority of important things we manage at work aren’t measurable, from the quality of our new hires to the confidence we instill in a fledgling manager.

The good news is that we manage these unmeasurables perfectly well without any need for yardsticks. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” won its place in the Big Book of Business Dogma because the business world, or at least the bureaucratic edifice it relies on, the one we call Godzilla, is all about measurement. Measurement is a religion in the business world! If we can slap a metric on something, by God, we’re going to do it. We love to measure things, because it makes us feel as though we’re really doing something. Look at my report card, Mom! I got three Bs and two As. Am I a good girl? Am I smart?

Measurement requires stopping the action, getting outside of it and holding it up against a yardstick, exactly the opposite of the activity that would create products or ship them, make customers happy or move our business forward in any way. Most of the time in the business world, goals come down from on high, and the appropriate measuring devices, rubrics or protocols come with them.

Measurement is our drug in the business world, because we believe that by measuring everything and sending the good news upstairs to the C-suite we can ward off the bogeyman of business, namely Getting On the Boss’s Bad Side. Measurement is our favorite CYA activity. It’s an inherently fear-based process, because the reason we measure everything in business is to prove to someone who’s not in the room that we did what they told us to do.

Last year I presented a webinar for a group of university alums. The fellow hosting the webinar had been a Resident Advisor before he became an alumni association person. At one point in the webinar, I used an example from the Resident Advisor world to illustrate the nonsensical and counterproductive nature of our measurement obsession.

“When you put on an event for the students on your floor, as an RA,” I asked the young man hosting the call, “how do you measure its success?”

“You report the number of students who came to the event,” he said.

“Of course,” I replied. “Forty people could show up, sit in their chairs, begin to listen to the speaker, be horrified at the awfulness of the talk and gradually dribble out the door over an hour’s time, but you’d be able to report forty attendees!”

“Now, If seven people came to the event and got into a real, community-building conversation about something important, you’d look like a failure as an RA because you didn’t hit the headcount mark for your event. That’s backwards. What is the purpose of a floor event when you’re an RA – to build trust and community, right? But Godzilla can’t see that. Godzilla loves the metrics, whether they’re significant or not.”

“So if you didn’t report on the attendees,” said my host, “but you said it was a great event, why would your boss believe you? He or she wasn’t there.”

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Liz, can I just say that you are the most inspiring woman of our times? Calling a spade a spade is one thing. But using that to dig the soil in order to demonstrate how actually simple things work and can create magical changes is something else. In your article, you do just that. It is amazing that you can echo the sentiments of hundreds and thousands of people today who are related to the Communications field where MEASUREMENT and GODZILLA are interchangeable words. Thanks for this perspective. Beautifully written as well. :)

The Godzilla system too often rewards those who follow it. I too worked at Fortune 500 companies, and at one point in my career was told by a senior executive that my views didn’t count because in my role (as a communicator) I didn’t bring in revenue. There was nothing measurable or of value in my work – I was, he said, one of those “creative types”. And yes, he did air quotes as he said that. This leader was smart and capable, but he saw things in a very logical and systematic way. Anything that fell outside of that viewpoint he considered worthless. You’re spot on Liz – this has to change, and Godzilla has to be taken down.

The topic is not black and white. Some things can and need to be measured while other things can’t and/or do not. Forcing employees to measure things just for the sake of reporting is a waste of time and can be demotivating. On the other hand, if the metrics applied identify issues and educate improvement efforts, then it makes sense to use them.

Fantastic article, Liz! I believe that (some) measures could still be useful (hey, I’m trained as a Computer Scientist) as long there’s (very) few of them and they are clearly related to the underlying intent of an organization’s activities. At the same time there has to be ample room for gut feelings, trust and common sense. And they must not automatically take a backseat to the measures (even if they are good ones in the above sense).

Having said that, I’ve yet to come across many organization that got this right. Seems there is some dark force at work that once you start down the measurement track you inevitably crowd out what makes us human. Wouldn’t it be great if we allowed ourselves to rely a bit more on our human qualities instead? And if that means letting go of measures, so be it. Maybe that would even help sharpen our “common sense” – a tool certainly much more useful to apply to the truly interesting questions of our (business) lives than any measure could ever be.

And with a sharpened common sense, we may even detect and eradicate other creatures of the corporate BS hall of fame. Watch out, Godzilla!

Liz, Can you tell us when the “A” in KSAs changed from its origination, Attitude, to Abilities? Maybe it happened the same year that prayer was outlawed in public schools?

Whenever it did occur, it marked the decline and eventual absence of the Affective domain of our humanness being valued in workplace.

Thankfully, what I see happening today, largely led by the new generation of workers entering leadership positions, is a return to advocating passion, commitment, values (moreso that just a poster on the wall in the lunch room) and those other “immeasurables” (air quotes) that you have spoken to.

Google and Facebook may still be leading the way, but all need to take notice.

W. Edwards Deming has been telling us for more than 50 years that one of the deadly diseases of management is the “use of visible figures only for management with little or no consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable.”

I find it so ironic that the these same people who are completely committed to Plan-Do-Check-Act and measuring everything that can be measured – people who buy-in to the statistical control systems that originated with Shewhart and Deming – completely ignore the lessons that he taught most fervently.

right on Geoff — Deming also said you can’t manage what you don’t measure…so Liz is both right and wrong (acc’d to Deming)! Others on the thread have said it, but there is definitely a place for metrics (same as there’s a place for a scoreboard in football), but there are also intangibles and “people factors” that are equally critical to productivity and are quite difficult to measure…Lencioni has written some great books on this stuff.